Wait…a Canadian who moves to Texas is a minority? Or are crazy Senators who wouldn’t lknwo foreign affairs if it bit them in the ass a minority? Your trolling needs lots of work I advise you to study the early work of Gary Ruppert

I’m full of admiration for the trolls round these parts. They’re proper method. I certainly couldn’t do what they do.

Also, reading up about Ted Cruz – is this guy a mound of contradictions, or what? Very well educated, connected & successful lawyer who’s filling the role of poor-man’s McCarthy, just in case there may be Muslin’s hiding under every bed.

Everyone saw what DeMint just did. You think Cruz wants to muck around with the senate when all he has to do is make a name for himself among the Know Nothings and he can skip into some right wing sinecure?

No, he’s not acting. He’s genuinely an odd, creepy true believer. A friend of mine from high school was on his floor freshman year at Princeton in 1988. I was hearing stories about this weird dude “Ted Cruz” 25 years ago.

We have some of those down south of here in the Bitterroot. Not nearly as interesting as the white supremacists up by Kalispell, the Freemen, or the militia types, all of whom make our Republican legislators look sane and moderate.

It has been a while since we the people had the discussion of whether it is right and proper for the members of one branch of government to abuse their power in order to prevent another branch of government from performing its duties. I think it time to have that conversation again.

My mental vision of Louie Gohmert is as David Koechner’s character in Anchorman, and actually seeing or hearing him has no effect on this. His actual face, voice and mannerisms disappear from my head within minutes.

Michelle Bachman was right about Huma Abedin, but that woman is a criminal. If you or I even attempted to do what she did, and only did it on one one-hundredth the scale, we would spend the rest of our lives in prison for fraud. Michelle Bachmann ran for POTUS, solicited and pocketed millions of dollars in presidential campaign contributions, and was, the whole time, carrying DUAL CITIZENSHIP in Switzerland. You can’t be a citizen of any other nation and be POTUS. You can’t be a citizen of any other nation and be Commander in Chief. And yet, Michelle Bachmann ran for POTUS with full knowledge that she was legally ineligible. She took in over $20 million in campaign funds for an office that she fully knew she COULD NOT HOLD. That’s fraud. That’s orange jumpsuit and flip-flops. But, no. She’s a folk hero because she knows how to Bull-shit gullible Tea Parties – a very RICH folk hero, with plans to get even richer with each election cycle.

Nothing says ‘great Senator’ like cynically staking your career on a brand of paranoia that ends up blowing up in your face, leaving you with nothing better to do than drink yourself into an early grave.

Yes. But there’s nothing that focuses the mind on the consequences of one’s actions like the contemplation of jail.

We need a change in the enforcers’ mentality towards neo-McCarthyism, and since it won’t come voluntarily due to the revolving door bribes lobbying in Washington, we’re going to have to do it by demanding legislative changes from the ground up.

Joe McCarthy is the model for modern conservatism’s handling of national security issues. I’m not surprised Winchester admires him.

There was no real policy or performance complaint that McCarthy was concerned about. His witch hunt wasn’t an actual effort root out communists and address what he thought was an important national security threat, like J. Edgar Hoover’s persecution of leftists. Right from the beginning, it was nothing but a partisan political stunt. McCarthy didn’t try to bag communists and end up catching some Democrats in his net; he was trying to slander Democrats, and any actual communists he might have stumbled upon were by-catch. He invented the entire thing just to have a club for partisan politics.

Today’s witch-hunting conservatives are like McCarthy, not like Hoover.

As a Texan my impression of the whole contest to replace Kay Bailey Hutchinson was that I wouldn’t lower myself to vote in the Republican primary and it had the advantage of helping me avoid one particular disappointment: I was of the opinion that whichever of the candidates was the most loathsome would come out on top in the primary. Given how quickly Cruz is making a name for himself, I pray that I was correct. I’d hate to think that he was the least bad option.

I voted for the Democrat, but I had no illusions of the chances of a non-Republican wining a Senatorial race in Texas right now.

I knew Ted Cruz personally when I was in grad school. He was an undergrad parliamentary debater and, as a former parliamentary debater, I helped out a fair bit with the debate team. He’s a deeply unpleasant human being (no surprise there).

Let’s just say that Ted was very widely seen as an asshole. And there are always assholes. Though the world of Parliamentary Debate had many more great people than awful people (two fine examples of the former who should be familiar to readers of this blog: Dahlia Lithwick and Chris Coons, both of whom I had the pleasure to know through debate), it shouldn’t be surprising to any of you who’ve been around either debaters or Ivy League undergrads that Ivy League debate predictably attracts a certain number of assholes, and the rest of us put up with them knowing that we’d only have to do so for a few short years.

Recovering from Ted’s becoming a major figure in American public life will be a lot more difficult, though I suppose I can comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ll get to share the experience with many more fellow sufferers.

As far as I can tell, Harry Reid seems to be playing a bit of hardball with the Republicans by not honoring any holds on the Hagel nomination, forcing them to take a cloture vote to delay the vote on the nom. The Republicans who aren’t as crazy as Cruz (well, 41 of them) are looking like idiots by standing with him. I’m pretty sure many of them didn’t want to make that vote, but were put in a position of having to be party-first nihilists in the open or back down. And the momentum of their ideology forced them to chose the first.

I suspect that we’ll see a bit more of Reid trying to get the Republican Senators to take cloture votes that will make them look bad. He knows that there are plenty who would prefer to work behind the scenes than to have to chose between going into a primary with Olympia Snowe’s record or into a general with Ted Cruz’s.

When I was 14 and fell completely in love with REM (around 1999-2000, because I was a little young to be paying attention to music when they were really big) the hipsters, or whatever they were called back then, looked down on then because they had made it big in the mainstream.

It’s still a pretty relevant song, at any rate. “Loyal to the Bank of America…It’s a sign of the times.”

I would say one is significantly worse than the other 2, but all three were light years better than, say, Milli Vanilli, Debbie Gibson, and New Kids, which is what I had been listening to. (In fairness to me, I only listened to New Kids under protest.)

Not really…I was clumsily suggesting that recognizing a reference to an obscure album track released by REM “before they got big” was one of those Insufferable Music Snob things (IMS and hipster being overlapping, but not identical, categories).

Saw them open up for the Police in Shea Stadium in 1983 I think. They had a college radio hit with “Radio Free Europe” at that point but I had the impression that I was one of the few who knew who they were.

I had a ticket to see them on the same tour, at JFK Stadium in Philly. Unfortunately, I had one ticket too many, because a friend backed out on me, so we spent REM’s set outside the gates, trying to find a buyer for the extra ticket. We got to our seats just as REM were wrapping up. Oh well…Madness were great, as were the Police. Nicest surprise of the day: Joan Jett, peace be upon her, was clad in black leather from head to toe on an impossibly hot & humid Philly afternoon, and positively tore the place down.